Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Activist and thinker Maurice Joyeux played a major role in the twentieth-century French anarchist movement. At the age of 17, he came into contact with anarchism, never to leave it until his death in 1991. Beginning with a three-year sentence during his military service, he served a total of ten years in prison, during which he had time to study the anarchist classics and occasionally organize mutinies. Joyeux was unemployed and sometimes homeless during the 1930s. His activism, radicalism, and sense of solidarity with prisoners and workers brought him into contact with syndicalism , and in 1936 he joined the Anarchist Union. During World War II, Joyeux joined the resistance to fascism and German Nazi occupation. In these darkest years of anarchist and syndicalist activism in France, he maintained his continued commitment to the cause. Together with his companion Suzy Chevet and other comrades of the Groupe Louise Michel (named after the Paris Commune activist), he kept anarchism alive by reconstructing the Fédération Anarchiste (Anarchist Federation, or FA). Participating actively in the French May 1968 revolts, Joyeux was critical of the ambiguity and imprecision of the movement and some of its Marxist influences, but welcomed the boost it gave to the FA by putting anarchism into the forefront of left radicalism. He was involved in founding La Rue , the anarchist cultural-literary ... log in or subscribe to read full text